Zippers and Zigzags
by quicksilversquared
Summary: Marinette enjoys her fashion design classes, at least most of the time. Sometimes, though, one of her assignments ends up posing a bit of a problem for her and she ends up stuck, trying to find inspiration from- well, from anything. Thankfully, she has a certain cat to make sure that she doesn't work herself too hard...and to provide a not-so-occasional source of inspiration.


_First story in my Finish the Alphabet challenge series! I figured after I hit 100 stories that **surely** I would have titles starting with pretty much every letter of the alphabet. Then I looked. And I'm missing eight letters, aka 30% of the alphabet. So I thought- hey, what if I challenged myself to come up with titles with those letters and then wrote stories using those titles as prompts?_

_First up: Aged-up Marinette designer fluff :)_

* * *

Marinette groaned and banged her head against the desk as she tried and failed to come up with any designs to fit the prompt that her professor had given them. She hadn't ever really thought to make _hardware_ the center of a design- she preferred to make the fabric pattern or the techniques shine- and now that hardware was meant to be the star...

Well, she was coming up short. But she was the wielder of Creation, so surely she had to come up to _something_ eventually.

"What hardware do you have?" Tikki asked, flying forward to look over Marinette's shoulder. "If you put out a couple pieces of each, maybe it'll inspire you!"

"I don't want to go out and buy something, though!" Marinette protested. "I have some things, of course- zippers and buttons and snaps and a couple of those studs left over from the coat that I made for Jagged Stone. But those are all little accessories, not centerpieces."

Tikki perched on Marinette's shoulder. "But that's the point of this assignment, right? To make little accessories into the focal piece?"

Marinette groaned some more.

Thirty minutes later found Marinette sitting in the middle of her floor, bits and bobbles sitting around her. All of the hardware that she owned had been found and pulled out, and now she was staring at the pieces with an increasingly frustrated expression on her face. She had been a little inspired by some of the things, but none of the things that she had sketched up had any of the hardware as any sort of focal point, just as smaller accents.

That was how Adrien found her, sprawled out and groaning into her hands.

"She's stuck on an assignment for class," Tikki told Adrien as he warily entered the room and circled around his (somewhat unresponsive) girlfriend. "I think it's a cool opportunity, and having all of this stuff out has given her ideas for designs, but none of them fit the prompt."

"Ooh, that's rough," Adrien said sympathetically. "Can I ask what _kind_ of design it's supposed to be? Streetwear, avant-garde, runway, anything you feel like?"

"Thankfully, it's whatever we want," Marinette told her hands. "I would _die_ if there were any other constraints to this. Not that there are many constraints yet, just that it's a hard one. Hardware has to be the focal point."

"Are your friends from class having the same problem?" Adrien asked. "Can you brainstorm together?"

Marinette made a face. "I'd hate to do that, because then who knows if I'll get as much out of the assignment? I might inadvertently use them as inspiration instead of the prompt. Though I _do_ know that Esme is focusing on having a zillion belts on her design. It's... well, I feel like that's been _done_ before."

Adrien nodded. "That it has. Even- even Father did it, though that was entirely when he did an avant-garde line to try to get _Gabriel_ to branch out."

That got Marinette to glance over, her expression turning concerned. Even after two years, Adrien's parents were still a bit of a sore point for him. Adrien flashed a smile at her, to reassure her that he wasn't going to be upset. She smiled back, then turned back to contemplating all of the odds and ends on the floor.

She didn't move at all in the next twenty minutes. Adrien moved onto the lounger, pulling out his Bio homework to work on. Every so often, he would send a concerned look at his girlfriend.

"If you're stuck, maybe you should step away from it for a bit," Adrien finally suggested. "You're just going to dig yourself into a hole if you keep working on this. Go get a snack, go on a walk, work on something else and just forget about the assignment for at least half an hour. At least."

Marinette startled, her eyes snapping back into focus. Apparently she had zoned out a bit. "I- but I have to start this soon! I need to come up with a design, I need to go shopping, I- I-"

"You don't design well when you've been trying too hard for too long," Adrien finished firmly. "And I'm going to up your step-away time to at least _two_ hours. Seriously. Shoo."

After several more minutes of waffling about- she _needed_ to get started at least a _little_ bit soon, so that she could get an idea of what sort of timeline she needed to be looking at- Adrien finally won their debate and Marinette found herself wandering downstairs, with her kwami but without her sketchpad. Adrien hadn't trusted her to not relocate and just keep on trying to come up with a design.

"He's probably right about a break helping," Tikki said as Marinette wandered into the kitchen to make herself a snack. "You've been working so hard lately! You had a whole slew of projects to finish up, and then a couple exams, and then that publicity thing as Ladybug, and then you helped your parents with several large order, _and_ you had birthday presents to make for- what was it, three people? Four? _And_ you applied to three different internships, too. You've been overworked lately."

"That's just how design school is," Marinette insisted. "I knew that second semester would be worse that the first, that wasn't a surprise. And it's just going to keep stepping up from here. I need to plan better, that's all."

Tikki looked dubious. "I think you planned very well. You've been trying to fit in more credits than the average person. I think taking the normal load might help."

"But school has so many good classes! They all have such valuable things to teach me, and I want to take as many as I can." Marinette finished making herself a sandwich and then headed for the door, Tikki floating along behind her. "There's techniques classes, and costume-making, and designing for menswear and women's clothing, and embroidery class, and-"

"Are any available over the summer?" Tikki asked. "So your school year load isn't so heavy?"

Marinette just shrugged. Really, it wasn't a matter of her being overly busy. She had a good handle on her coursework. It was just that this particular class's current assignment was proving difficult. It wasn't a_ required_ class, which was probably why Tikki thought that the _slightly_ heavier course load was too much, but it _did_ force Marinette to think outside of her normal design box, and that was a good thing.

Well. Most of the time, at least.

Marinette headed out the door with a wave to her parents and a heads-up that Adrien was over and probably would be staying for dinner. Then she was wandering, watching other people passing by and taking a mental note of some of the styles that she was seeing. She had to force herself to stop doing that after a couple minutes, remembering that Adrien had sent her out to take a break from fashion for once. So she focused on other things, the feel of the breeze in her hair, the chatter on the sidewalks, the birds singing in the trees and the cars rushing by.

It was nice.

She wandered along the Seine, watching the boats moving past. Some kids played in a park along the riverbanks, kicking a ball back and forth, and Marinette stopped to watch. It felt nice to not be rushing around for once.

Three hours and some-odd minutes later, Marinette got back to the bakery with a new plan in mind. She would sleep on the whole hardware design thing, and in the meantime knock a few assignments for her other classes out of the way. She would set aside a couple hours this evening to hang out with Adrien before he had to go home (even with as relaxed of a guardian as Adrien's bodyguard was, he _did_ still ask that Adrien not stay the night with his girlfriend, at least not yet), and then she would actually go to bed on time. Then she would take another stab at the design tomorrow, or at least do some searching on the internet to find some inspiration.

That was the plan, at least, until she got up to her room and found that her boyfriend, apparently bored after being left alone for several hours, had flopped down on the floor and was amusing himself by making patterns with all of her assorted hardware bits, swirls and zig-zags and smiley faces covering the floor.

And inspiration hit.

Colors and textures and shapes came together into one as Marinette shot across her room for her sketchbook, ignoring Adrien's yelp as he rolled out of her path, too used to her sudden bursts of inspiration to get in her way. She could feel him come up behind her as she half-sat, half-fell into her chair, pencil already out and heading for a blank sheet of paper. A fun summer dress made its way onto the paper, arrows pointing to half-drawn shapes on paper and circles around other lines. Five minutes later, Marinette sat back, holding her sketchbook out in front of her to survey her newest design.

Yes, that should work. And it would work _well._

* * *

Marinette couldn't help but smile as she got her mannequin set up next to her workstation. While it had been a little difficult at times to bring her vision to life- finding a fabric that would hold up to the hardware instead of being pulled down was difficult, _especially_ since she was trying to make a summer dress, and it ended up being a combination of slightly heavier fabric and Adrien's find of lighter-weight hardware for her to use that worked best.

She would have been lost without his help, honestly.

Around the classroom, people were unpacking their finished projects. Marinette couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of people who had gone for leather pieces, metal shining against the dark material. There were pieces with cross-crossing belts as the focal point, and she couldn't help but be glad that she had decided from the start not to go down that route. One person had knit fine chain into a draped jacket, which _looked_ cool but no doubt weighed a ton. Another one of Marinette's friends had knitted a tank top, threading long metal beads onto the yarn so that the result was a dangling metal fringe. There were studded tops and jackets, one jacket with a very prominent, very gorgeous diagonal zipper running from one shoulder to the opposite hip.

And then there was Marinette's knee-length cream-colored dress, bronze zig-zags breaking up the fabric. Some of the zig-zags were zippers, both wide- and fine-toothed. Some were studs. One of the rows of zig-zags was tightly packed eyelets of different sizes. The zig-zags started wide at the bottom of the skirt and got narrower as they went up They weren't all the _exact_ same shade of bronze, but that just added to the charm.

It was fun, it was a little funky, and it was _different._

"Oh, that's gorgeous, Marinette!" Esme exclaimed, appearing behind Marinette. She started circling Marinette's design as Marinette slid it onto the mannequin, zipping up the- paradoxically- hidden zipper running up the back. "It's so different than what everyone else has done! Leather and hardware is such a natural combination, but you've made it _different."_

Marinette couldn't help but smile. "Thanks! I'm really happy with how it turned out."

"I wish I had thought of something like that instead," Esme admitted, turning to gesture to her own piece. The criss-cross belts came together in a large, decorative buckle. It was eye-catching, but Marinette was sure that she had seen something similar before. "This was all I _could_ come up with. And it's nice enough, but... a solid third of the class has done a variation on belts."

"I was coming up blank until Adrien started playing with my odds and ends bin," Marinette admitted. "He had made some patterns on the floor with stuff, just because he was bored, and it- it just _clicked_. Making a relatively straightforward dress that uses the hardware as the pattern? I figured that it would be fun."

"It is fun! That's a dress you could totally wear out on a date." Esme grinned at Marinette. "Which you were already planning to do, weren't you?"

Marinette's smile turned a little shy as she ducked her head. "Well, since Adrien was the one who inspired me, it would only make sense, right?"

Esme laughed. "I don't think that the two of you necessarily _need_ an excuse to go out on a date, from what I've seen. You're too cute together."

"We make a good team," Marinette acknowledged, trying not to laugh as she said it. A lot of people told her and Adrien that, and they didn't even know _half_ of how very true that was. Adrien was her boyfriend, her superhero partner, her best friend, the (occasional) keeper of her sanity, her fashion design sounding board, and a fairly constant source of inspiration. No matter what they tackled, she knew that they would always be able to do it together. After all, even if they were _retired _superheroes, there was a reason why they had been picked to be with each other.

"I'm _really_ lucky to have him."

* * *

_A/N: As with most of my stories, this is a one-shot and is therefore complete. And as always, reviews make my day! :)_


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